Our faculty and staff sometimes take a break from their work at Roosevelt University. Many of them are bloggers, competitive runners, cooks, golfers, tennis players, gardeners, volunteers or gamers. But sometimes, their extra-curricular activities are a bit unexpected.

Martial Arts and Athletics

Jim Michael
Director of Development Corporation and Foundation Relations

Jim Michael raises money for Roosevelt, but has also won three world silver medals in the Masters 4 Division of the International Federation of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He has trained in martial arts and combat sports for 30 years.

Joe Chan 
Professor of Information Systems

Joe Chan has taught information systems at Roosevelt since 2002 and served twice as dean of the Heller College of Business. He has studied the martial arts for even longer — 40 years. He learned Kodokan Judo at a young age and then studied Taekwondo under a Korean master in the 1990s. He now holds a sixth-degree black belt in Taekwondo and is an active practitioner and certified master instructor of the art.

Pamela Robert
Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology

Pamela Robert’s work focuses on inequality, maternal-child health, and disability discrimination. She holds a second-degree black belt in Seido Karate, a discipline she has been practicing for almost 20 years. She serves on the Board of Directors of Thousand Waves, a martial arts and self-defense center in Chicago, where she chairs the Violence Prevention and Self Defense committee. She is also an organizer and regular contributor to the Meditations on Activism program.

Adrian Thomas
Professor of Psychology

The director of the Industrial/Organizational Psychology PhD program, Adrian Thomas is also a competitive fastpitch softball player who has been a member of four teams over the past 25 years, twice on teams which won the national championship. Since 2014, he has played second base for the North American Fastpitch Association’s Wilcom Mobil Team from Kenosha, Wisconsin, which was the national runner-up in 2015. He has twice been named All-World second baseman.

Ali Malekzadeh
President and Professor of Business

President Malekzadeh is an experienced academic administrator known for his work on strategic management, leadership and organizational behavior. Beginning in the 1990s he began to train in Taekwondo and achieved the level of fourth degree black belt and certified instructor. Taekwondo was a family affair — Malekzadeh studied the sport along with his wife and two daughters, all of whom achieved fourth-degree black belt status as well as international rankings.

Performing Arts

Darlene Morris-Fullerton
Director of Financial Strategy and Planning

When she’s not overseeing Roosevelt financial strategy or studying for an MBA, Darlene Morris-Fullerton is an award-winning rhythm and blues singer, performing with her husband Timothy Fullerton in the ensemble Time Morris Featuring Diva D. She has sung for over a decade at such places as Back Room Chicago, Navy Pier and music festivals throughout the city. In 2014, Time Morris won the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago’s Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music — Rhythm and Blues.

Judy A. Dygdon 
Associate Professor of Psychology

An expert in learning-based approaches in clinical psychology, Judy Dygdon, with her husband Tony Conger (also a psychologist and professor emeritus at Purdue), is a competitive ballroom dancer specializing in the American Smooth style. They have been competing for 18 years, starting at the beginner Bronze level and now dance at the top Championship level of amateur competition. Previously they’ve  competed in country-western dancing and wrote three instructional line-dance books.

Edward Green
Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice

Edward “Eddy” Green teaches criminal justice but is also an award-winning guitarist, songwriter and performer who specializes in bluegrass, country, blues and rock ’n’ roll. He has performed with bands that have opened for such performers as Leon Russell, Old Crow Medicine Show and many others. Green has released six CDs and in 2016 reached the semi-finals of the International Songwriting Competition.

Bonnie Gunzenhauser
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English

When she’s not leading Roosevelt’s largest college or researching the history of literacy, Bonnie Gunzenhauser sings alto with the Chicago Chorale, a 62-voice chorus based in Chicago’s Hyde Park. She has been a member of the chorale since 2004.

Larry Howe
Professor of English

A specialist in Mark Twain and in film studies, Fulbright Scholar Larry Howe (pictured, center) is also a mandolin player and songwriter with the Compass Rose Sextet. Since 1999 his group has produced three CDs and performed music defined as world folk and gypsy jazz at clubs, festivals and other venues. He also writes articles about mandolin builders for the Fretboard Journal.

Bill Mackay
Senior Secretary, Dean’s Office, Heller College of Business

Bill Mackay has been at Roosevelt for 15 years, and currently works in the College of Business. For 30 years, he has also been a songwriter, composer and guitarist, performing on 16 records (eight with his own music), touring the country, and sitting in with various groups. His newest record was published in May by Drag City Records featuring a mix of folk music, experimental rock and jazz.

Arts and Crafts

Priscilla Perkins 
Associate Professor of English

Priscilla Perkins teaches American literature and is also a fiber artist specializing in documentary embroidery. She creates works focused on historical and contemporary issues of social justice.

Debbie Yates
Administrative Secretary, Heller College of Business

In her “other life,” Debbie Yates is an avid quilter. She has been quilting for some 35 years and is an active member of a quilt guild; her work has been featured at large international quilt shows as well as locally.

Rudy Marcozzi
Associate Dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts and Professor of Music Composition

Rudy Marcozzi has been a cabinetmaker since high school. His projects have included wall units, exterior and interior doors, and most recently kitchen cabinets and a baptismal font for the Catholic chapel at Northwestern University.

Charles Madigan
Presidential Writer-in-Residence

Charles “Charlie” Madigan came to Roosevelt in 2007 to teach journalism and politics after a career at a number of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, where he worked for 29 years as an editor, correspondent and senior writer.

A guitarist for 54 years and a performer for 25, he now also builds ukuleles. Over the past three years he has built and sold 15 instruments, branded as “travelin’ rat ukes.”

Hobbyists and Collectors

Mike Helford 
Associate Professor of Psychology

Mike Helford teaches industrial/organizational psychology and is also a fish hobbyist with 60 tanks in his basement, housing cichlids from Africa, many of which are endangered or extinct in the wild. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Greater Chicago Cichlid Association.

Paul Wertico
Associate Professor of Jazz Studies

Seven-time Grammy winner Paul Wertico teaches jazz and is a percussionist who has toured the world with the Pat Metheny Group and other ensembles. Wertico has also been a train enthusiast since he was a boy, collecting model trains (he owns more than 100 of them, and 42 switches) that run around his basement in a model town called Taliaville, named after his daughter.

He collects railroad books and artifacts, and whenever he can — especially when he’s on tour — he rides or drives trains, having done so throughout the U.S. and the world in countries including Croatia, France, New Zealand and Hungary. He has a new group — Paul Wertico’s Off the Rails Trio — which performed this spring at an event for the Center for Railroad Photography & Art in Madison, Wisconsin.

Donnette Noble
Associate Professor and Chair of Organizational Leadership

Donnette Noble’s academic field is diversity and leadership. She is also a serious (very serious) baseball fan. She has visited all 30 major league baseball parks in the United States, some of them twice if they’ve been remodeled or relocated. Why? Baseball, she simply says, is her favorite sport; she loves the game, strategy, talent, environment, history and even the umpires.

Stuart D. Warner
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director, the Montesquieu Forum

Stuart Warner teaches courses on Montesquieu, Plato, philosophy in film, politics and literature, and much more. Before he was a professor he began a book collection by spending $32 on an eight-volume history of philosophy. His collection has grown to include over 9,000 scholarly, rare or antiquarian books, including a 1625 edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays, a first edition of Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes published in 1721, and a first edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840.

William Host
Associate Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management

William “Bill” Host teaches courses in hospitality management and also collects postcards related to Chicago hotels and tourist sites, the bulk of which are from the first half of the 20th century. His collection of nearly 2,000 postcards was the basis for his co-authored book, Early Chicago Hotels (2006).

Unclassifiable!

Jane Curtis 
Associate Professor, English Language Program

Jane Curtis has taught hundreds of international students in the English Language program since 1982. A native of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Curtis has been named an “Official Ambassador” for Groundhog Day. She says she was tricked by her mother into baking groundhog cookies every year, and that the groundhog family tradition has emerged in the next generation, as her niece is getting married at Gobbler’s Knob this summer. Gobbler’s Knob, of course, in Punxsutawney, is the site on Feb. 2 where the groundhog annually sees — or doesn’t see — its shadow to predict the length of winter.

Ken King
Professor of Elementary Education

Ken King works in the field of science education, but has also participated in Boy Scouts of America continuously since he first joined the Cub Scouts in 1968. An Eagle Scout, he has served on numerous national and regional committees, helped develop handbooks for the young adult venturing program, and co-created eight handbooks for Cub Scouts and their leaders. This past May, he received the 2017 Silver Buffalo Award, Scouting’s highest commendation, for his service to young people.

Jonathan C. Smith
Professor of Psychology

Jonathan C. Smith specializes in studies of stress, relaxation and mindfulness, and teaches critical thinking skills.

In his spare time, he founded the Reformed Church of the Spaghetti Monster and has published its gospel, The Pastafarian Quatrains. Pastafarianism, for the uninitiated, is a social movement spoofing and resisting the ideologies of creationism and intelligent design.